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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

Not every Makefile honours the DESTDIR option...what to do if DESTDIR is not honoured.

In a lot of cases, src2pkg will do all the work of creating a package for you.

Ha! Nothing like a blast from the past.

I couldn't help but adding my two cents' worth here, it might be useful for others. Don't forget slacktrack, which is another utility for making a slackware package when DESTDIR doesn't work. I used it recently to make a package out of the texworks editor (just to try it out). The usual method (essentially that of the OP!) didn't work because DESTDIR was not honoured.

I was able to make a package (lazily) by doing the following:

obtaining the texworks source tarball: texworks-0.4.5-r1281.tar.gz

in the same directory as the tarball, I created a basic little build script tw.build:

You're welcome Geremia, I'm glad you found the post helpful! I must say, it took me quite a while to work out what/how slacktrack is/works, it was a bit inaccessible. But I came across the following set of slides from a talk Stuart Winter gave on slackware packaging:

"spill is a program for creating set of symbolic links from one directory hierarchy which point to corresponding filenames in a separate directory hierarchy. It's primary use is to allow packages built from source to be installed in separate directory trees, which are all linked together under a common directory tree (e.g. /usr/local) to reduce the length of the PATH environment variable. "

"Spill" is not a part of Slackware and isn't included in SlackBuilds.org so I can't use "spill" to install "spill".

More seriously, "spill" seems to assume that all configure files honour the --prefix option. You can't really afford to make any assumptions about a source. Each source needs to be treated as potentially a special case.